•
As we drew near to the farther southern shore, I could see a train following the cliff face by the edge of the lake, where rocks rose sheer from glassy waters. It emerged and disappeared through a series of tunnels, following the Circum-Baïkal route my train must have taken, after leaving Irkutsk, before plunging inland, towards the Chinese frontier. This section of the line had been particularly cruel on the workers; it was constantly sliding into the lake, while blasting operations caused many deaths. When the scheduled time was exceeded, the authorities became fretful, and soldiers from local battalions were commandeered and formed into working gangs, like the convicts or Chinese coolie labour. The troops had no say – military discipline was inexorable. It was barely fifty years since army reforms had reduced the twenty-five years’ army service which earlier Tzars had maintained. The commandeered troops, it was said, worked an eighteen-hour day, hauling sleepers and construction material, after which they were lined up for military exercises. But then, the legacy of positively maniacal militarism, so cherished by Paul I, and by his son Nicholas I, was still a force with which to be reckoned in Russia.
It is recounted that when Nicholas II, as Tzarevitch, was visiting Siberia in 1891, an equerry was dispatched from the capital, post-haste across all Russia in Europe and all Russia in Asia, to Vladivostok on the Pacific rim, being instructed to take no rest by day or night, so urgent was his mission. He accomplished the journey by sleigh, britchka, and on horse-back, at the gallop, in record time, after which he collapsed and was for some while under treatment in a mad-house. But then, the matter had been of the utmost urgency. The Heir to the Throne had just received regimental promotion and, said General Staff Headquarters, it was essential that his new insignia and epaulets should reach him without delay.
There were, it seems, no aspects of Russia’s past, whether trivia or great sweeps of history, which did not point to the inevitability of its Revolution. Everything came back to that one inescapable fact. Everything spoke of the abuses and misrule this people had always endured. Revolutionary Bakunin was succinct, writing in La Réforme, in 1845:
‘Despite the terrible slavery which crushes it, despite the blows which rain on it from every side, the Russian people is in its instincts and habits altogether democratic. It is not corrupted, it is only unhappy . . . The moment is perhaps not distant when the risings will be merged in a great revolution: and if the Government does not make haste to emancipate the people, much blood will be spilt.’
•
I climbed the main stairway of the beautiful colonnaded white mansion that had been built by a parvenu Siberian merchant to became the residence of successive Governors, Count Mouraviev-Amursky, my childhood’s hero among them. His visionary approach to his post was matched by his energy: not only had he acquired the Amur provinces for Russia (thus gaining his title) but been among the first to urge the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway. In Irkutsk Mouraviev had surrounded himself with a staff of exceptional young officials who shared something of his large views. He was both an idealist and a man of action: a despot too, but a benevolent one.
His statue, a stocky, side-whiskered figure, still stands in the little park near his house, overlooking the Angara. The Traveller remembered that in his youth all loyal Siberians removed their hat to this statue; but I saw no such pious gestures. The memory of this remarkable man, to whom Siberia owes so much, seemed tolerated, but not venerated. I was glad to think that once I had placed flowers on his grave in the Paris cemetery where he lies, far from his Siberian achievements. The elegant white mansion from where he had ruled so imaginatively was pitted with shell marks, memorial to a violent battle between Red and White forces during the Civil War. Today it holds the city’s Scientific Library, and the Regional Archives – particularly rich ones, I guessed, sniffing longingly at the files.
One of the greatest Siberian libraries is now in the possession of the Library of Congress, at Washington. It was sold by its founder, Gennadius Yudin, in 1907, at a purely nominal figure ‘for the purpose of strengthening the ties and understanding of the two peoples.’ Such was the wish of this self-made man who attained wealth by his distillery at Krasnoyarsk, and set about amassing everything pertaining to Siberian and Russian history, ethnology and the fine arts. Yudin’s dream of unity between Siberia and the United States of America had also been in Mouraviev’s mind, some fifty years earlier. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary Prince Kropotkin writes:
‘In Mouraviev’s own study, the young officers, with the exile Bakunin’ (who was also Mouraviev’s cousin) ‘among them discussed the chances of creating the United States of Siberia, federated across the Pacific Ocean with the United States of America.’
The pleiad which surrounded Mouraviev during such visionary discussions, and others on a more realizable level, were to prove some of the most remarkable men of their age. Count Ignatiev, triumphant diplomat, brilliant rogue, in the game of international banditry, who obtained vast concessions from the Chinese and is remembered chiefly for his Central Asian acquisitions; young General Kukel, who became chief of the Governor’s General Staff and who was presently to obtain the even younger Peter Kropotkin the future ‘anarchist prince’ as his aide-de-camp, and with him to plunge into a programme of administrative reforms. Here too was the youthful Baron Wrangel, an equally cultivated and advanced administrator, he who befriended Dostoievsky at Semipalatinsk. These were men who could keep pace with their chief, and in Siberia, were the right men, in the right place. This was Siberia, where, for good or bad, the excessive qualities of Russia reached their apotheosis.
•
‘Which was Mouraviev’s study?’ I asked, as I went through the beautiful rooms with their high porcelain stoves and splendid Bohemian glass chandeliers, turquoise blue, or ruby red, where the lofty windows overlook the wide river. I wanted to see the setting for this co-radiation of imaginative administration: also, to visualize the background for some of the fateful encounters that had taken place here before and after Mouraviev’s tenure. For a while, his successor was able to continue the liberal tradition: but generally, both before and after this era, the climate of Government House was inflexibly reactionary.
The rooms through which I went were now lined with bookshelves and the students worked at long tables. I envied them the possibilities of their studies here, for Irkutsk is, naturally, rich in first-hand material on the Dekabrists. I wondered; which of them had come to this house? Not in their earlier days, when they were shackled, far away; but those intrepid women who followed them in the years between 1825–1830, battled, fragile yet steely, pitting themselves against one of Mouraviev’s predecessors, a man of very different kidney. Such men saw to it that every opposition and humiliation confronted these women. They automatically forfeited their titles and possessions. Nor could they ever return to Russia so long as their husbands were serving Siberian sentence. Their children lost their names, or the right to attend schools: those born in Siberia were automatically classed as the children of serfs. To most provincial administrators, as to the Tzar, the slightest liberal sympathy spelled anarchy, and like him they followed the celebrated dictum: I prefer injustice to disorder.
Nicholas I’s savage death sentence on five of the leaders stunned the nation. Hanging was not then practised in Russia, and the gallows were clumsily knocked together. It was only when the five condemned men saw this rickety contraption before them that they lost hope. No experienced hangman being found for the task, the authorities had been obliged to summon one from Finland. Even so, things went wrong. The ropes gave way as the prisoners were strung up, and they crashed into the pit below, breaking their legs and arms. ‘Unhappy Russia! they don’t even know how to hang properly,’ said Mouraviev-Apostol, as he lay waiting for death. At last their broken bodies were hauled out and strung up all over again, efficiently this time.
•
Over the years the Tzar maintained his implacability. Siberia must finish off the rest of
the rebels. Those whom he had not hung remained dead, in his eyes. When, eighteen years later, Prince Sergei Wolkonsky’s daughter Hélène attended the opera in St. Petersburg with her uncle, her youthful beauty caught the Tzar’s attention.
‘Who is that charming young creature?’ he asked.
‘My niece, Sergei’s daughter, Sire.’
‘Indeed? The dead prince’s child?’
‘But my brother is not dead, Your Majesty – he is in Siberia.’
‘When I say someone is dead – he is dead,’ was the Autocrat’s reply.
•
‘At what do you look?’ Olga Maximova asked me, as we went down the steep stone stairway of the Governor’s mansion. I was observing how the stone was worn away, in two trough-like depressions; unnaturally deep, I thought, for a house only built in the early part of the last century. But then I remembered the ceaseless file of exiles that had climbed them to plead for justice, for mercy, for life itself. The years of enlightenment and compassion had been as brief as the tenure of office held by Mouraviev and his successor; before and after stretched years of bitterness. Hopes barely raised and soon dashed have a heavy tread, and stones, like hearts, were worn away in Siberia.
CHAPTER XXVI
As befitted a capital city Irkutsk possessed its own standards. I observed that certain things were not done – were not Siberski. I liked this word: it had an air of local pride about it. Above all, it was not Siberski to dwell too much on the immediate past of Stalinist purges and labour camps. The citizens were proud of their present and the all-absorbing future for which they worked and they liked this to be admired. But since I had come five thousand miles or more to indulge the historic and personal interests so richly represented in Irkutsk, I continued my usual pattern of rationing visits to contemporary achievements, and went my own way.
In the forgotten old churches of outlying villages I still found ikons which bore beautiful names and were counted miraculous. St. Praskovia and St. Innokenti were ever present, being Siberian saints; St. Innokenti was the country’s patron saint. A handful of old women humped into shawls, were usually shuffling and snuffling round, busy with cleaning rags or candles. Sometimes they were dispensing the little funeral cakes which are ritualistically eaten in memory of the departed. It is the custom of both the Greek and Russian Orthodox church that the coffin remains open till the moment of burial, and in the U.S.S.R. I became hardened to glimpsing these still faces, waxy and remote, wreathed in bright paper flowers, being carried through the streets or placed in the churches, surrounded by little groups of mourners. There was a practical side to this, too. Since funeral parlours appear to be rare in the U.S.S.R. and housing shortages still acute, with teeming families crowded into two-roomed apartments, the dead lie more peacefully in quiet dark churches until the earth receives them.
Some of these old village churches were particularly beautiful in their mixture of simplicity and splendour. Their thick, low, white or ochre washed walls and dark woodwork were confounded by the glitter of sumptuous metal-cased ikons, some three or four feet square, shimmering in the glow of coloured lampadas. When I asked the old women the names of the various saints they mumbled them for me with a furtive air. The Virgin, ‘Countenance of all Sinners’, ‘Of all Consolations’ or ‘Joy of the Afflicted’ seemed particularly suited to their Siberian setting and the long history of suffering they had consoled. Here in Siberia, as in the Kremlin or the Church of the Old Believers, which houses some of Moscow’s richest ikons, the Russian people’s innate love of splendour is evident. In the past an oriental passion for jewels was always remarked by visitors to both the Court or merchant society, and it was maintained in extravagant religious ornamentation. The Virgin is sometimes mantled or netted in a lattice of pearls, her jewels worthy of Sheba’s queen, her background cloth of gold or hammered silver, while crucifixes bleed rubies for blood or are crowned in emerald thorns. It is an idiom more barbaric or Eastern than the purely worldly splendours of so many Catholic images; while the diamond-studded crowns and jewelled copes still worn by the Patriarch and high clergy are worthy of a coronation. (Even in a more purposeful, less colourful contemporary scene, something of this unbridled love of splendour is to be seen in the Moscow metro – surely the most refulgent of any, anywhere.)
‘A very old painting – probably a Byzantine saint,’ said Olga Maximova, rather dourly I thought, when I lingered in the Znamenskoe Monastery, admiring the curiously crowned Virgin of Feodorofskaya. On leaving I picked my way over a handful of beggars crouched on the steps, supplicating silently.
‘They could all have work, if they would,’ said Olga Maximova, glaring at the log-like figures. ‘They are begging, because they think some God is going to give.’
The ethics of begging proved a lively subject for further discussion in the restaurant that night.
Once, I was told, Irkutsk possessed thirty fine churches and not a single factory.
‘Then beggars were inevitable . . . but now — Now we have over a hundred factories at Irkutsk.’
‘And two churches?’
‘You criticize us for that?’ yelled the stranger who was eating at our table. He sounded truculent but as he was obliged to shout above the vibrant tones of the tchang and the temir komous, curious instruments native to Tadjikstan and now being demonstrated fortissimo by members of the Tadjik People’s Opera Ansamble, also staying at the hotel, no doubt his combative tone was not directed at myself.
I hastened to explain that I just happened to find old churches and ikons more aesthetic than factories. But I could see this was not considered really Siberski, so I listened with an air of enthusiasm while he told me of the latest kind of yurts being manufactured for the Buriat-Mongolian encampments across the Gobi. The supporting poles (which come in three sizes), are now made of fibre-glass, while the former felt coverings are replaced by foam plastic, an excellent protection against the snow . . . But the snows of yesteryear – where are they?
•
In the sad autumn days, with their whipping winds already hinting snow, Siberia had a melancholy that would soon give way to beauty, I was assured. Winter would crystallize the scene to a white world glittering under those blue and radiant skies which all Siberians vaunt. This is another aspect of their pride, along with size and extravagance. ‘In Siberia,’ says the proverb, ‘100 miles is an ordinary distance, 100 roubles an ordinary sum, but a day without sunshine is extraordinary.’ Nevertheless I was content with the grey skies I found there; they were in keeping with my mood.
Long wet afternoons, when even Russian’s enthusiasm for picnics in the taïga flagged, were spent in the Historical Museum or meeting with persons connected with the city’s historical background. With them, I followed the changing pattern of the centuries and the land.
In this Museum, ethnographic, historic, political and economic developments were interwoven. Here were reconstructions of Siberia’s prehistoric beginnings, the dwellings and customs of the primitive tribes, the epic of Cossack conquest, of explorations and colonial expansion or the merchants’ trading ventures along Chinese shores, following the exotic tiger-lands of the Amur. Here, as might be expected, I found whole sections devoted to the convict settlements, the Lena goldfields, the Alexandrovsky forwarding prison and many more such terrible records. Here were grim photographs of prison life on Sakhalin, of which Chekhov wrote in his Travel Notes from Siberia. The yellowing old prints of this island, which lies off the extreme north east coast, show a forbidding coastline rising sheer from the sea, to heights bare of anything but the prison buildings and the stark huts of settlers, usually former prisoners working on the land.
As might be expected, a whole section of the Historical Museum (a turreted crimson building, robber-baron in style), was devoted to the Trans-Siberian, its founders, its construction, its first run, and the vicissitudes of its branch lines. Here were photographs of the various types of engines and cars used over the years. Here were pompous officials in tight
gold-lace uniforms standing beside Chinese dignitaries in silken robes, with massed bands blasting away on a bunting-hung platform, celebrating the opening of the Chinese-Eastern Line, in 1887. Here were pictures of elaborate compartments such as I had not imagined, such as the Traveller had not described, which, by their resplendence, had lost all the drama of train travel. Lace curtains, mirrors, Moorish-brothel style alcoves and painted and carved ornamentation vied with tasselled trimmings, and an art nouveau bathroom where, by some feat of stabilization, the water could not flood overboard, however much the train bucked.
One lavish model had been originally designed for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, with the purpose of inspiring confidence in possible Western passengers. There was also a dining car, expressed in similarly fantastic terms, where arm-chair travelling Parisians could feast to the accompaniment of mechanical swaying and rattling, while roll after roll of scenic canvas raced past the windows, depicting steppes, mountain peaks, raging rivers, and whole Kremlins, gold-domed and gorgeous, to emphasize local colour. (What bliss, could I have installed this in the nursery, long ago, to lend zest to my simple suppers! But could it possibly have heightened those exotic perspectives once conjured for me, from an eider-down yurt?)
In the section devoted to the Civil War were photographs of the armoured trains – broneviki, improvised by using sheets of iron-plating and layers of sand bags, with gun-turrets mounted on the roof of carriage or box car. These ambulant forts were much used in the fierce battles which raged between 1917–1920, when the Trans-Siberian was the prize – life-line for which Red and White forces struggled. But while the White forces were sustained by Allied aid, for French and British troops fought beside them, and were later joined by American forces, 9,000 strong, plus 17,000 Japanese, the Reds fought on alone, ill-equipped and poorly organized.
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 39